Good morning.

A quick thank-you to everyone who's been replying, voting and sending Still Monday around.

We're still early enough that every response gets noticed.

Keep them coming.

And if your team has a group chat large enough to require a search function, today's issue may be for you.

Let's get to work.

JPMorgan Chase has more than 300,000 employees.

Jamie Dimon thinks some of its most important work should be handled by teams that operate more like Navy SEALs.

Small.

Capable.

Empowered to make decisions.

Dimon has argued that when JPMorgan needs to solve specific competitive problems, it should use small teams with enough authority to actually act instead of sprawling groups trying to coordinate everything with everyone.

There is research behind the idea.

As groups get larger, individual effort can decline.

Responsibility spreads out.

Ownership becomes harder to see.

And eventually everybody is involved while somehow nobody is responsible.

You have probably attended the meeting version of this phenomenon.

Four people:

Everyone talks.

Everyone knows why they're there.

Someone makes a decision.

Fourteen people:

“Should we wait for Mike?”

“What does Legal think?”

“Can somebody send me the deck?”

“I wasn't on the earlier thread.”

“Let's take this offline.”

Meeting ends.

Follow-up meeting scheduled.

Large teams feel safe because everybody important is represented.

They are also expensive.

Every person creates another communication line.

Another opinion.

Another calendar.

Another dependency.

Another person who may need context because they missed Tuesday's meeting.

Small teams have their own problems.

They can lack expertise.

They can make bad decisions faster.

They can become little kingdoms.

But when the mission is clear and the right people have authority, something changes.

Nobody can hide.

If five people own a project, everybody knows who's doing what.

If 27 people own it, the answer is probably: the team.

Which is corporate language for:

We'll figure out who to blame later.

The useful idea here isn't “make everything tiny.”

A global bank obviously needs lots of people.

The idea is much more practical.

The number of people in the company and the number of people solving one problem do not need to be the same thing.

Maybe your next project doesn't need a steering committee.

Maybe it needs four competent people and permission.

Meta spent much of the past year eliminating management layers as it pushed toward a leaner organization.

Now its Applied AI division has reportedly begun asking some individual contributors whether they want to become managers again.

Apparently management is dead.

Management has also been asked to join a 2 PM meeting.

Bayer Pharmaceuticals says it stopped assigning traditional sales targets to individual countries and regions, replacing them with more flexible resource allocation and giving teams closer to the market more authority.

COO Sebastian Guth says one U.S. team made a contract-sales decision in under an hour and launched the program in 45 days.

Somewhere, a 97-tab annual budgeting spreadsheet just felt a chill.

AT&T CEO John Stankey says employees shouldn't show up to meetings simply to observe.

He wants people prepared with facts, information and an actual point of view.

Jamie Dimon similarly says he prepares before meetings and values disagreement.

Terrible news for everyone whose meeting strategy was:

Camera on.

Nod occasionally.

Survive.

Found the right person, but they’re in a country where you don’t have an entity? Setting one up can take months and significant cost.

Remote removes that barrier by becoming the legal employer through our own entities — handling compliant contracts, local benefits, tax setup, and onboarding for you. In fact, an employee is onboarded to Remote every 7 minutes.

Once they’re hired, the same in-house teams that support employment locally also run payroll — so you’re not bouncing between disconnected providers. Less setup, less complexity, and less time between finding the right person and getting them started.

See how it works

Take one project you're working on. Ask every person involved:

What do you personally own?

The answer should take one sentence.

If three people give the same answer, fix the overlap.

If someone can't answer, ask why they're on the project.

If nobody owns the decision, you have discovered the next problem.

Do this before creating another meeting. Easy uuh!

A 30-minute weekly meeting with 12 people consumes:

6 hours of paid work.

Do that for 48 weeks and you've spent:

288 hours.

That's more than seven 40-hour workweeks.

On one recurring meeting.

The room may be free.

The meeting isn't.

Before inviting another person, ask whether you need their:

decision
expertise
work

Or whether you're inviting them because excluding people feels dangerous.

“Just in case” can get expensive.

Invited: 17

Required: 11

Optional: 6

People presenting: 4

People making the decision: 1

Person who owns the actual work: … (not in the meeting)

Couldn't make it.

A surgery team, product launch, and audit need different people.

But there is a useful test:

If somebody disappeared from the project for a week, would anyone know what stopped?

If the answer is no, you may have found an extra box.

Vote below.

Reply if your company has discovered a particularly creative way to turn four people into a 23-person working group.

And send this to the coworker who keeps getting invited to meetings “for visibility.”

They deserve visibility into www.still-monday.com.

Technically Tuesday. Emotionally Monday.

See you manana.

— The Still Monday Desk